With the decline of passenger serivce and introduction of replacement lightweight cars, the DRGW converted existing passenger cars into Maintenance of Way cars. One such car was X-3339. Part of the a ACF order of Baggage-RPO heavyweights. My special interest is MoW cars and with this just being a basic repaint and decal job this seemed like a no brainer.
The base for my model is a Micro-trains baggage-rpo in DRGW pullman green. Lucky for me car X-3339 was not modernized like other cars in its class and still had the square pane windows. Other cars in the class also converted to MoW were rebuilt in the 1950s with sealed windows which have rounded corners. Unlike most repaints I did not strip any paint off the car before hand. This seemed within prototype bounds as its unlikely the DRGW would have stripped the car before repaint into non-revenue silver. The silver used was tru-Scale immitation alluminum. This is the same color used on the lower half of DRGW locos and non-stainless passenger cars. Car was stripped down to the body and painted with an airbrush. unlike the prototype the roof was left black as it would be hard to paint in silver without first priming the model, which I did not have the paint for. An attempt was made to paint handrails orange to match other DRGW MoW cars which feature orange grab irons.
No decal sets exist in n scale for DRGW passenger cars. A combination of an early DRGW diesels set and generic MoW set was used to add the "flying Grande" to the letterboard and the MoW set for numbers and other MoW specific decals. The car data decal was a personal choice as this features in the fictional SLVS world and it seemed like a good touch. The car was then reassembled and test run with the rest of my DRGW MoW fleet to check if anything had been broken or warpped in storage. I started getting into weathering at the time, so all my DRGW silver cars feature this dark grime look which is not perfec, however I think it works well enough. This car is completely finished and sometimes features on the Alamosa-Mesita turn as a large shoving platform and MoW tool car as that track is always having issues.
